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Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire) (Lab): I agree absolutely with the right hon. Gentleman. Does he also agree that in many areas such as mine, the large stores that we are talking about—out-of-town-type stores—are right on the edge of a local authority, with almost their entire custom coming from the next-door local authority? Were this nonsense proposal to get anywhere, we would have a situation in which a local authority was dealing with an issue that affected people who did not belong to that local authority.

Mr. Forth: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He anticipated what I was going to say, but he puts it well. A real problem with my right hon. Friend's amendment is that in seeking to base the demand on a local authority area, we bump up against the problem, which occurs so often, of proximity to the boundary and cross-boundary activity. That is illustrated graphically by the Greenwich
 
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judgment in relation to local authorities and schools, on which I do not want to digress, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an analogous case, however.

Mr. Greg Knight: Does any of this matter in relation to my right hon. Friend's argument? Surely, if a large shop is popular and people want it to open on Christmas day, some of the customers may come from far afield, but at least it will have a customer base within the local authority area, and if 1,000 people want the shop to open, why should it not?

Mr. Forth: I will come to the issue of 1,000 people in a moment. We have not got to that yet—we are still talking about local authorities. My right hon. Friend has made a brave attempt to define local public demand, but we have already arrived at a real problem in relation to what that local public demand is and how we measure it. I am simply saying that rather than taking a defined area, my preferred approach would have been to take a five or 10-mile radius around the shop in question. That might have made a lot more sense—perhaps not administratively but in terms of identifying local demand. I therefore query the use of the local authority area as a criterion on which to measure demand.

Mr. Chope: Does not my right hon. Friend's argument ignore the fact that the impact on the local community of a shop opening is likely to be in that very local authority area?

Mr. Forth: No, I am arguing the opposite. The impact will be within a prescribed area in relation to the store, regardless of the local authority. Some local authority areas—with which I am not very familiar as I have the pleasure of representing a suburban residential area in London, which is not large—are very large. Such areas, which many of my right hon. and hon. Friends represent, can be 50 to 60 miles from one end to the other. Therefore, the point about local authority demand and local authorities falls down immediately if we are talking about the potential impact on a community of a shop or store opening. I now wish that I had tabled an amendment to my right hon. Friend's amendment to change the definition from "local authority" to "prescribed area around the store". That opportunity, however, has gone.

The issue of 1,000 people signing a petition also raises some difficulty. Of course, one can pick any arbitrary number. I think that 1,000 is a low number on which to base such a proposal, and had I considered this matter, I would have picked a higher number. We could have the difficulty of competing petitions. Were 1,000 people, or even 5,000 people, to petition in the way that my right hon. Friend has suggested, it is likely that people of a legitimately different point of view might want to table an opposite petition. His amendment does not seem to provide for that. Would it not be embarrassing, to say the least, if 1,000 people petitioned in one direction and 5,000 people petitioned in the other? One wonders what the outcome would be. Perhaps it would have been better to provide for a more competitive or comparative process, whereby people could indicate their level of wish or demand one way or the other, rather than having a one-way mechanism. In some ways, it seems
 
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profoundly undemocratic that a small number of people can dictate to a community what will or will not happen in that area.

Mr. Knight: Why should anyone who does not want to use a shop have the right to stop it opening? The whole purpose of the amendment is to accommodate those who do want the shop to open. I thought that my right hon. Friend was a libertarian.

Mr. Forth: I try to be a libertarian whenever I can, but as I said at the outset—and this will be the thrust of my analysis on Third Reading, although I suspect that that is some way off—there is a competing pressure here, and a competing demand.

I would have much more sympathy with my right hon. Friend's amendment were it more appropriately drafted. First, I do not think that, in this instance, specifying the local authority area is a good idea. Secondly, I am not convinced that a petition from 1,000 people is a sufficient basis on which to make the move towards liberty that my right hon. Friend seeks. Thirdly, I see a lacuna in that there is no provision for the counter-view to be measured or assessed. For all those reasons, I think the amendment is defective.

That is not to say that, in an ideal world, we should not allow for more local discretion and decision making. Perhaps we have all missed a trick—I plead guilty to this myself—in not taking the opportunity presented by the Bill to revisit the philosophy behind the Sunday Trading Act 1994 and, indeed, what preceded it. We shall have a chance to do that when we deal with the next group of amendments.

My right hon. Friend may be on to something really important. Sadly I consider his amendment defective, but perhaps we should have allowed much more scope for that local discretion and decision making rather than imposing a blanket national provision. My right hon. Friend has, after all, put his finger on the fact that local communities vary enormously in their composition, in their ethnicity and, in some cases, in their religious affiliation. We can readily identify many local communities with particular characteristics and meriting different treatment, in terms of shops opening on Christmas day among other things. Perhaps we shall be able to discuss the issue some other day, or in the context of another private Member's Bill. We should never regard what has been done once as being set for ever. Indeed, we may have a chance to explore these matters later today.

All in all, I am not unsympathetic to the thrust of what my right hon. Friend is trying to do, but having looked in some detail at the way in which his new clause and amendment would operate, I am afraid I cannot support them at this stage, and I would need a lot more convincing before I could. I hope he may yet be able to persuade me, but thus far he has not been able to do so.

Mr. Chope: I am rather disappointed by the illiberal approach of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth), which contrasted with the classic liberal approach adopted by the hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce).

Like most Members, I consider Christmas day to be the second most important festival in the Christian calendar, and think that we should do everything
 
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possible to preserve its significance. I have to recognise, however, that an increasing number of people in the country are not Christians and do not profess to be, and that many positively adhere to other religions. In those circumstances, I think we need to preach the virtues of tolerance, understanding, freedom and choice.

That, indeed, is what the Bishop of Winchester did when he preached at evensong in Christchurch priory in my constituency on Trinity Sunday this year. He spoke of the significance in the Christian calendar of that day, which—for those less familiar with the dates in the calendar—happened this year to coincide with the 60th anniversary of D-day. He pointed out that the Winchester diocese contained two large non-Christian communities—a large Muslim community in Southampton and a significant Jewish community in Bournemouth. He might have added, although he did not, that there is also a significant community of Sikhs and Hindus in Southampton, as I know from the time when I represented Southampton, Itchen.

10.45 am

New clause 1 reflects the reality that parts of our country now contain large non-Christian settlements. If the Bill is designed to keep Christmas day special for Christians, where does it leave those who are not Christian? In Scotland, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers has an agenda to make new year's day a special day on which shop workers would not have to work, perhaps because people in Scotland regard new year's day as almost a bigger religious festival than Christmas day. What is certain, however, is that new year's day is not a Christian festival. I do not believe that the campaign by those promoting the Bill is motivated by a concern for Christianity; I think they are concerned about shop workers working on public holidays, and if that is their agenda I think they should be open and clear about it.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) acknowledges that agenda in his new clause, which I was happy to support. He says we should recognise that Christmas day is a Christian festival, and that those who are not Christians and do not want to join in should not be compelled to do so. The issue is voluntarism versus compulsion. My right hon. Friend says that all employees would have to be non-Christian before his new clause could be triggered and the shop could be opened. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst feels that that is going slightly too far, but I think my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire should be praised for saying that we need to ensure that every Christian who might be forced to work in a large shop should be protected. If only one Christian were working in the shop the new clause would not apply, but if there were no Christians and the owner wanted to open the shop, why should he not be able to do so?

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